> Andrew > > Sorry for the mistake about your name and thank you for the tolerance.
No problem. I've been called worse, and not in deliberate insult, either. I think the worst was being introduced to someone as Adam Adamson. The perils of a surname that is almost a first name. I'm not immune to the syndrome, either, having in person done the first/last name switch with two others, so I live in a glass house and shouldn't throw stones :-). > I think that you have a rosy idea of what private enterprise researchers > actually do. In many cases their attention span is under a second (well say > five seconds). They have real work to do. But please DO NOT suggest that I > think the AM is not any good. It is. But to suggest that any of this is OK > is ideal is exaggeration, and that is what I was responding to in Stevan's > post. You should also realize that private enterprise researchers (such as a > fish farmer) does not have the easy un-approved access to funds that a > university person has, so they don't go further. (I add that I am an > honorary 'university person' so I admit to bias.) Though I have industry > tacts and experience). Well, I have no experience with fish farmers. My experience is mostly with computing researchers and law resaerchers. Both of them tend to do research in very much the same way an academic will do, albeit usually with less broadness in their initial grabbing of what looks worth initial consideration than an academic would use (in my experience). I do know through my wife, who is a bi-tech journalist, that bio-tech industry people often have the same problem of limited access because of high costs that academics do but they also need to keep up with what's going on in areas related to their field so OA is really valuable to them. I don't have evidence that they do the same winnowing down that I described, but unless one works in a very narrow field I'm not sure what else one can do and keep up with the rest of the work going on. > Ion point 2, I agree, mostly. In practice the mandate 'policy' is almost > meaningless. In some cases it means something but is ignored. I do know you > are in complete agreement with Stevan, but he uses shorthand because of the > email flood, which most do not understand. I didn't say the mandate was meaningless. I think the mandate is an important and, when done correctly, necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving OA via the Green Brick Road. Too many policies are meaningless because they're either not mandates (opt-outs, attempts to force copyright-retention). I'm not sure if there are any solid mandates for ID/OA that have achieved less than 50% after a reasonable period of operation (say, 3 years). Given the mass of evidence that outside HE Physics and CS that unmandated deposit rates are around 20%, getting to 50% 60% or more in a few years is more progress than we can demonstrate for any other mechanism. Show me a mechanism with a real track-record of better success and I'll happily start advocating it. > Where we disagree is that mandates are THE answer. After years of toiling > along this path I have to disagree. Mandates are never going to work, just > by themselves. That is why publishers are so complacent. The answer is more > complex, and proponents of OA should be more perspicuous. The Research Works Act, however, seems to show that publishers are NOT complacent about mandates. In fact, they do seem to be rather more worried about mandates than unmandated allowances for archiving. > What I most fear is that this mandate policy will cost OA another one or > perhaps two decades. It's the best we've got now, though, and at least it's a clear mechanism that has a proven small scale track record and does scale. Nothing else we've got now shows that. So, if people want to explore other mechanisms, they're free to do so, but promoting them befre they're shown to have a better track record than the best we've got now is premature and, IMHO, more likely to lead to further lost access than promoting mandates. As mandates become better understood, we can hope that they become easy to get adopted and easier to understand and implement. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
